Artcraft: A Look at Garrison Art in Warlords of Draenor

Today Blizzard published another series of Artcraft--today it's all about Garrisons, which players can construct buildings on, recruit followers for, and customize!

For our complete set of Garrison resources and guides; from basics to buildings, followers to missions, and much more, check out our Garrison Hub!

Click the cut for more garrison details!

Blizzard

Greetings, and welcome to another edition of Artcraft! I’m Chris Robinson, senior art director of World of Warcraft, and for this second entry I’ve gathered a group of Warlords of Draenor developers to talk a bit about Garrisons—specifically, how our artists are working closely with the game designers to ensure that the visuals we’re crafting support their design goals.

We’re not really going to get into the details of how Garrisons work here, like specific mechanics of their design. Think of this more as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into our art process with two of our groups: our dungeon art team, which is responsible for all the Garrison's large buildings, walls, gates, and so on; and our prop art team, which is focused on the profession buildings and all of the awesome details you’ll find inside of them.

Gameplay First

Before we get to that, first we'd like to talk about a few aspects of the art team's relationship with the game designers. We’ve asked Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton to talk a little about how the Garrison works, and how design and art come together to get something as massive as Garrisons into the game. Here’s Cory:

"Hey Everyone! The Garrison feature is going to be a huge part of your core experience in Warlords of Draenor, so it’s really exciting to get a chance to talk about it. As Chris mentioned, it's a massive feature with a lot of different moving parts, one of the biggest of which is the visuals—and that’s where our art team comes in. We knew we wanted the Garrison to feel like a big new feature, but we also wanted to keep it familiar, like bringing a piece of home to Draenor. There is just something about running into Stormwind or Orgrimmar that evokes that sense of faction pride, and that’s exactly what we wanted out of the Garrison. The art team was able to work with us to deliver brand new art that still evokes those feelings from our faction capitals.

Nailing the look is just one part of the process though. A big part of the feature is being able to increase your Garrison’s power over time, and we wanted to make sure you see that reflected in the art. This means that all of the Garrison buildings have to have multiple, and increasingly epic visual upgrades. The plot system used for Garrisons—which allows you to customize your layout and place buildings anywhere—presented a unique challenge for the art team, since even though a building needs to look more epic at each upgrade, it couldn’t actually change shape at the base. Check out some of the under-development examples below.

—Cory Stockton, Lead Content Designer

The Dungeon Team: Making Old Look New... or Is It New Look Old?

Hi there, I'm Wendy Vetter, lead artist for the World of Warcraft dungeon team, and next I'm going to give you an inside look at how we’re bringing the Garrison buildings into the world.

When working on the Garrison, we decided to start with the Alliance buildings first, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on today. When we first began, we thought, "Wouldn’t it be cool for players to get to have some of the original buildings from back in Elwynn and Redridge in their Garrison? Our resident Concept Wizard (actual title) Jimmy Lo ran with this idea of a “trip down memory lane” by bringing back a lot of those early buildings, and we worked on trying to keep a lot of familiar parts of the buildings intact while updating themwith new textures.

After trying that idea out, we began to notice the buildings were looking too familiar—it wasn't epic enough, and wasn't looking like something you’d expect to see in this big new feature. So we updated the recipe to "extra-crispy"—and that meant going far beyond a new coat of paint on an old asset.

Click on all the things!

We didn't, however, ignore the past—we built upon it. Keeping the original spirit of the old buildings, we began exploring new designs. We created fresh silhouettes and pushed the individuality of each building, creating visually exciting upgrades as you progressed. This way, when you get that first shack you call a Lumber Mill—an oversized crate with some sticks and a dull saw in it—you're excited, but you know there's lots of room for improvement. As you build your army and finally get that third-tier Lumber Mill though, you feel like a badass ready to fight back against the Iron Horde.

I have to say I love, love—did I mention LOVE?—the Mage Tower. The library invites the player to grab their favorite book of spells (mine is Beatrice’s Magical Exploits Into the Wilds of Wildervar), wrap up in a blanket, plop on a nice soft chair with their favorite pet sitting on their lap, and read till the light of the fire dims to crackling embers. When we’re creating the art, we actually use small stories like that as a way to guide the scene. We use lighting, material choices, silhouettes, and carefully crafted details to invite the imagination of the player to look beyond the pixels and textures, and bring their character into the world. I like to think of the buildings as characters themselves, each with a personality, from the little nicks on a doorway, to the warm hearth in the Town Hall.

We hope you feel right at home when you step into each of these places.

“One of the most powerful aspects of an artist’s mission is storytelling, and working to fill the space in the Garrison has allowed us to really focus in on that. Decorating a particular set or building provides an opportunity to communicate a lot of information about how the space is used and how it was made, and all the pieces come together to help convey an overarching theme. Little nuances and details in the props can help give the player context into what’s happening in a particular area of the game, and ultimately, really help to tell the story of an entire zone.

We approach each of these tasks on both micro and macro levels—evaluating how each smaller piece comes together as a larger whole. This is where the real challenge lies, since we don’t want to visually overwhelm the player—but at the same time, we're giving everyone the visually striking, high-quality level of art they've come to expect from World of Warcraft.”

“For the profession hubs, we wanted the player to be able to experience leveling up their chosen professions not only with skill points, but also visually through their Garrison. As the player progresses, each profession hub will level up, and the associated building will become more visually impressive. We treated each profession hub as an opportunity to describe the NPC who works there—how neat or messy they are, how they might work, and how they’ll grow with you as you level up your Garrison. We also thought it would be fun to throw in small hints of different races that might be associated with certain professions, such as draenei for Jewelcrafting or dwarves for Blacksmithing, to tie in the many races that give the World of Warcraft its depth and history.“

—Jay Hwang, Senior 3D Artist

One More Thing

Hey there—Chris here again, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this closer look at the buildings for your Garrison. While we focused on Alliance Garrison this time around, we’re definitely making a lot of great progress on the Horde counterpart, and look forward to giving you a more in-depth preview in a future episode of Artcraft. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect. See you soon!

Garrisons have three tiers. They level up when you have filled up all of your building plots, which can be small, medium, and large in size. Each size has a different bonus. Tier 2 for example gives you 15% Follower Recovery Time, 5% Passive Melee Buff, 5% Passive Caster Buff, 10% Travel Speed, and 15% Garrison Supplies, 10% Ore Gathering, and 5% Herb Gathering.Constructing more buildings improves your ability to recruit and manage followers, as well as your efficiency in completing missions.You can upgrade your buildings three times, like Barracks to go on multiple missions, Inns to recruit followers, and an Infirmary to speed up injured Followers. When buildings are upgraded, they become more powerful and visually elaborate.Players can also select a specialization for their max level various buildings, which can be changed once per day. Sample Armory Specialization is Striking Blade: Grants the player a Critical Strike buff that persists through death for 4 hours. Visit the Armory to gain this buff.There are many ways to get blueprints to learn how to upgrade buildings, from quest rewards to world drops to faction rewards.

Customization and Social Interactions

Players can show off Garrisons to their friends and customize its appearance:

Garrisons can be decorated with monuments and trophies, which may be tied to achievement rewards.

Players of the same faction can visit your Garrison if they are in your party. You can also trade Garrison resources with friends.

Garrisons will not be phased like Tillers farms--if you have a huge tower, your friends can see it across the zone.

Players can place their Garrison in several zones and Alliance and Horde get unique artwork for their buildings.

A Garrison's appearance and furniture can be further customized by players selecting a certain design "spec." Layouts are also decided upon by the player.

Followers

You can meet and recruit NPC Followers in your Garrison, who can benefit your character and Garrison in various ways:

Followers can go on various missions--some can gather profession resource,s return treasure, or other useful items like epic gear. They also bring back materials to build your Garrison.

Followers have a character level, item level, and traits that affect tasks. Traits are affected by a follower's rarity--there are common, uncommon, rare, and epic followers. Higher rarity followers have more traits.

Followers gain character levels just like players from 90-100. You can give them Follower-specific gear to equip, which can increase their item level.

Followers can be acquired in several ways: naturally found in your Garrison, attracting more by building an Inn, completing quest objectives, and paying mercenaries.

There are plans for cool interactions between Followers and zones--for example, your Follower might be out on a mission in a dungeon, get captured, and you'd rescue the Follower the next time you ran it.

A sample follower shown at the panel was Hamfist Facewrecker, a warrior who had Dragonbane (Damage boost when fighting Dragons), Rambo (Bonus to all stats when fighting in the forest), Last Man Standing (Bonus to all stats for each dead party member if the last one alive), and Blacksmithing (Can participate in Blacksmith missions and can research new recipes for you at the Garrison.

Missions

Missions are completed by your Followers and are essential to build your Garrison further.

Missions can be completed while you are offline.

Missions provide resources for your Garrison as well as profession reagents, but also some useful loot for your character.

Missions can be completed by Followers in parties--if you are offline, your Followers can still pair up with other Followers.

As time goes on, missions can stretch out into several days or a week. Missions and Garrisons are not intended to be very time-intensive at high levels.

Some followers might be better at some missions than others, depending on their traits.

The sample UI showed a list of followers and a main panel of different missions. These missions take different amounts of time and followers.

Quest missions take 15-30 minutes and are used to level up Followers. Higher level quests reward player loot.

Scenario missions take 2-3 hours and has a high chance to reward player loot.

Dungeon missions take 1-3 days and are guaranteed to have player loot.

Raid missions take 4-7 days and unlock when you get 10 followers to 100. Raid missions also include transmog rewards from old raids.

The mission UI filters missions by type and shows the amount of time a mission will take as well as desirable traits for the mission. If your follower has those requested traits, you will get a bonus.

Blue Post: Take Charge of Your Garrison

Blizzard

In Warlords of Draenor, you’ll make a permanent impact on the world with a Garrison: your own personal fortress that you build, staff, and manage. You’ll customize your Garrison’s layout, appearance, and gameplay effects, and attract followers to operate it. The Garrison allows World of Warcraft players to own a larger part of the world than ever before, and opens up a wide variety of interesting gameplay decisions—with as much or as little micromanagement as you wish.

Your Garrison exists seamlessly in the world, but you won’t need to go into an instance portal to visit your home base—as you travel through Draenor, you’ll see your Garrison looming on the horizon.

Read on for more details.

FollowersFollowers are NPCs (non-player characters) that you recruit to join your Garrison. You’ll send them on missions to improve your Garrison and earn loot for your character. You can also allocate them to complete tasks—things like crafting or gathering resources, which they’ll do whether you’re online or offline.

Followers have a character level, an item level, and traits that affect missions and tasks. For example, if they have the Mining trait, you’ll be able to assign them to a Mine in your Garrison to gather resources for you. There are common, uncommon, rare, and epic followers, and their rarity affects the number of traits they can have.

Recruiting FollowersTo run an effective Garrison, you’ll first need to recruit followers. Some will make their own way to your base, but you can also upgrade your Inn to attract more followers. You can also win followers to your cause as you progress through the game’s story, when completing quests, or simply by coughing up the right sum of gold to hire mercenaries.

When they’re not away on missions, your followers hold down posts at your Garrison, where you can visit them at any time. A major goal for the Garrison system is for followers to be dynamic and interesting—for example, if a follower fails a mission that takes place in a local dungeon, they might be taken prisoner; the next time you adventure in that dungeon, you’ll be able to rescue them.

MissionsMission Objectives

You’ll send your followers on missions for varied purposes. Successful missions will give you the resources you need to keep developing your Garrison, but you’ll also have the chance to acquire powerful loot for your character, and your followers will gain experience for each mission they run.

The resources you’ll acquire during missions include both existing crafting reagents and Garrison-specific materials. For example, if you assign a follower to a mining mission, you could receive ore, but you might also unearth stone, a new kind of resource used to construct and upgrade buildings.

Though followers are great for solo play, the system also has multiplayer elements. When you dispatch a party of your followers on certain missions, you’ll also be able to join forces with your guildmates’ followers, even if your guildmate is offline.

Follower ProgressionFollowers grow in power in a way that mirrors players’ progression. From levels 90–100, followers will gain character levels, which have a significant impact on their abilities and mission success chance. They’ll also increase their item level as you equip them with follower-specific gear; once they’ve reached level 100, equipment will have a larger role to play in their overall effectiveness.

Garrisons & BuildingsBuilding Functions

Buildings are the individual “pieces” of your Garrison—Stables, Farms, Mines, Armories, and more. They improve your ability to recruit, use, and train followers; to craft; to complete missions; and to run missions more quickly by reducing your followers’ downtime.

Each building in your garrison can be upgraded, which amplifies its mechanical effect and visuals. For example, an upgraded Barracks will grow bigger and more impressive, but it’ll also increase the number of followers you can send on missions at one time (for example, 5 followers at once for a level 1 Barracks, then 7 followers, then 12—though the exact numbers are still in flux).

Customizing Your Garrison’s LookBuildings in your Garrison can be placed in a number of configurations. You can only place small-sized buildings (primarily crafting-related) on small plots; a larger building, like a Barracks, won’t fit. Bigger buildings can be constructed early on—even a “starting” Garrison has room for a large structure. As your Garrison increases in level, you’ll get access to more and larger building space, and increase the versatility and power of your holdings.

Garrisons are visually distinct depending on whether you’re a Horde or Alliance player, and you’ll be able to place your Garrison in one of several zones on Draenor. You’ll also specify your Garrison’s layout (the physical location of buildings within your Garrison’s walls), and select the buildings you’d like to include. Choosing to “spec” your buildings (more on that below) will also change cosmetic aspects of those buildings, like furniture types and decorations, in addition to imparting different gameplay effects.

Garrisons can be shown off to same-faction players in your party, who can walk around your base, converse with your NPCs, and appraise your layout. You’ll have a reason to show your Garrison off, too: trading resources. For example, if you have extra building resources, you’ll be able to bring them to a friend’s Garrison and exchange them for materials that you need.

Specializing BuildingsWhen specializing your Garrison’s buildings, you’ll choose a variant on the bonuses and abilities the building provides. For example, one Mine specialization might make your miners gather ore faster by the hour, while another will increase the chance that your workers strike a rare mining node. Several buildings can provide you with access to professions that your character hasn’t mastered—though you won’t have enough plots to put one down for every profession.

As you begin building up your Garrison, we expect that you’ll interact with it quite a bit. However, over time, it’s expected that your interaction will become more casual. At lower levels, your missions are on shorter time cycles (minutes, hours or days); once your followers have reached high levels, it’s likely that you’ll send some of them off on longer raid missions for a week at a time. We want garrisons to be important, but our goal is a system that’s easy to enjoy without being extremely intensive.

Plant Your Flag on Draenor!Your Garrison will be woven deeply into the storyline of Warlords of Draenor, beginning when your faction leader commissions you to establish a beachhead on this alien world—but the ultimate fate of your personal fortress on Draenor is entirely up to you.

Comments

Comment by rain3x

Reminder: Take all of this with a grain of salt. You never know which parts of this may or may not turn into the next "Dance Studio."

Comment by vukovikdjvs

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 12:22:17 -0600

Looks good, sounds good.. Just need to try it now!

Comment by j4ckal09

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 12:30:01 -0600

Am I even playing World of Warcraft anymore? Followers to gather mats for you while you're offline? I was extremely excited for this expansion because of the lore involved, but this is just ridiculous. The garrison idea is cool, I assume each players would be phased or something, having an interactive building to yourself would be cool enough, you don't need NPCs farming for you. That's pretty much botting - and we all know Blizzards stance on botting.

Comment by SykoSoul

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 12:30:28 -0600

Beautiful.

Comment by gnomerdon

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 12:43:10 -0600

Reminder: Take all of this with a grain of salt. You never know which parts of this may or may not turn into the next "Dance Studio."

/highpitchgnomechuckle heheheheh

imagine RP servers... paying 125 gold to entry into the club, with bouncers.

yep... i see it happening already. lol

i just can't wait to create a 40 man party, and just destroy these new establishments..

Comment by Rankkor

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 13:10:54 -0600

Pure alliance =(

Where's the horde love?

Comment by Unformedbobbie

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 13:12:44 -0600

I love the garrison idea, can't wait to get my hands dirty making all the upgrades! :) but I would like to see a class/race touch to these. Like if your a troll, have a troll hut with the tiki masks, or if your a night elf a moonwell perhaps. about class distinctions there could be specific things to relate to each class like special quests to recruit a member of your class like a rogue hiring an SI:7 agent or or a ravenholdt assassin. Just some ideas off the top of my head.

Comment by Bairot

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 13:31:17 -0600

As much as I love the horde I just hate horde buildings, How I wish we could scavenge alliance building blueprints and use them as horde XS

Comment by grayhand

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 13:59:32 -0600

I second the concept of allowing the Horde to use alliance buildings (perhaps by raiding for various blueprints/blueprint pieces). I love horde buildings and i love being horde (troll war ftw), but those alliance buildings just tap into a nostalgic part of my childhood, hehe.

Comment by FireKatKid

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 14:31:33 -0600

Reminder: Take all of this with a grain of salt. You never know which parts of this may or may not turn into the next "Dance Studio."

Yeah, but that pic up there shows a Dance Studio option! O: So that means all promised things ever in history are going to be in Warlords of Draenor!

Garrison based mount after fully upgrading it = pony with a Deathwing motif obviously!

Comment by SouthernBoy

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 15:17:48 -0600

Am I even playing World of Warcraft anymore? Followers to gather mats for you while you're offline? ... you don't need NPCs farming for you. That's pretty much botting - and we all know Blizzards stance on botting.

How is having an NPC farming leather mats for you any different than planting a Raptorleaf Seed?

Comment by lankybrit

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 15:49:15 -0600

Great job wowhead in posting everything I had forgotten about Garrisons along with Art stuff. Really appreciate it.

Comment by Azrile

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 16:21:40 -0600

This is one of those things were I just have to accept that I don´t appreciate the same things as everyone else.

But for me, the coolest part about this system is going to be the followers and sending them on raids and stuff, and building up the garrison.

I am not a person who is big on detailed graphics and ´little details´. For me ( and I know I am not everyone). for me, I would prefer much simpler buildings and graphics, but that were unique for each race. Especially for those of us that are going to have 11 lvl 100s, each with their own garrison. A little deflating that they are all going to basically look the same, even if they all have the same small details in each building.

But that is like a 10% thing.. mostly I am stocked about the gameplay of garrisons and to see how they integrate it with questing and normal dungeons runs. Would be awesome to gain followers by releasing them from a prison during a quest, or getting a key to unlock their shackles from a dungeon boss as random loot.

Comment by Tylorlastor

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 16:43:32 -0600

Please add different style buildings for different races :/Something about my Blood Elf or Forsaken using these just doesn't feel right.

Comment by reggiejames

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:22:39 -0600

Am I the only one whose getting the "Clash of Clans" vibe from all this?

Comment by Kre8ive

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:58:49 -0600

Omg... I would love the Transylvanian/Dracula forsaken buildings ! =D

Comment by Kaelgan

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 18:00:05 -0600

The architecture of new Orgrimmar has been more of the same ugly. Please don't continue this old trend in Draenor. When designing Orc buildings the devs ask themselves, "Does it have a spike on it?" --> If "No" put a spike on it. --> If "Yes" leave it alone. Orgrimmar looks less advanced than Stormwind because if its dirt roads and third-world architecture. They have paved roads and gnomish space age tech, we have sticks and rocks. No wonder they beat us in pvp. Maybe we can learn to make a proper city from the original orcs.

Comment by alcajasa

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 20:10:10 -0600

did anybody noticed the pandaren monk called Umad brew?

Comment by jags623

on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 21:49:08 -0600

I think they are trying to change things up a bit. They do it every expansion. I can understand how some players would be frustrated with certain changes; to quote the famous phrase "if it isn't broken don't fix it".

The opposite of this would be monotony. But this would be even worse than moving things around. There is a certain video game franchise that has been criticized for making the same game a dozen times. If WoW didn't change every expansion it would quickly become monotonous.

Comment by polvitaklaaja

on Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:18:31 -0600

nice, nice.. but i hope that it would be possible to make buildings like old brill was. and to make those "followers" be ghouls and/or ghosts.